The instant invention relates to apparatus for accumulating strips of labels of different lengths, and more particularly to such apparatus for use in a presenter of a kiosk for postage labels.
Apparatus for accumulating sheets or strips of paper or similar, flexible material is well known. The sheets or strips are fed seriatim from an upstream location and are accumulated against a registration point to form a stack which can then be removed by an operator or conveyed downstream for further processing. The prior art accumulators are designed to function with sheets or strips of uniform length. Clearly, there are many applications where it would be desirable to be able to accumulate sheets or strips of different length.
One application where accumulating strips of different lengths would be desirable is that of printing postage labels with pressure sensitive adhesive on releasable strips of paper. Such postage label strips would be dispensed by a kiosk to a user having access thereto. If two different lengths of strips can be dispensed by the presenter of the kiosk, then it is possible to dispense any varied number of postage labels desired by the user as long as one of the lengths of strips can be varied as determined by the user.
Accordingly, the instant invention provides apparatus for accumulating sheets or strips of paper in which the accumulation consists of one or more sheets of a pre-determined length and a final sheet or strip of a variable length equal to or less than the pre-determined length. Such apparatus could be used to dispense any required amount of labels from, for example, a kiosk.